Civil Society in Question

By Jamie Swift

In this concise, critical study of civil society, Jamie Swift sketches the history of the concept from its roots in the eighteenth century, to the present. Swift looks at its practical application in specific cases, such as Canada’s Victorian Order of Nurses, and with community-based groups in South Asia (India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh). He examines the relationship between voluntarism, the state, politics, and the market, and considers the motives and priorities of those using the term today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Apr 15, 1999
• ISBN: 9781926662589

Jamie Swift

Kingston writer Jamie Swift is the author of numerous books. He works on social justice issues for the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul and lectures at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University.

Book preview

Civil Society

in Question

"Civil society is a geographically and socially uneven

landscape. It is and always will be contested terrain."

Civil Society

in Question

Jamie Swift

Binder1_0003_001

Civil Society in Question

© South Asia Partnership, 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or CANCOPY (photocopying only), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1H6.

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges financial assistance for our publishing activities from the Ontario Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

Special publishing support for this book was provided by South Asia Partnership, 1 Nicholas Street, Suite 200, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1N 7B7 and by The Trillium Foundation.

Every reasonable effort has been made to find copyright holders. The publisher would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Published in collaboration with South Asia Partnership Canada.

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-926662-58-9 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-926662-59-6 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-896357-24-9 (print)

Editor: Robert Clarke

Design: Point of View

Between the Lines

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for Richard and David

Contents

Foreword, by Richard Harmston

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Unpacking the Conceptual Ragbag

2 The Politics of Helping People: Canada and Sri Lanka

3 From Enlightenment to Globalization:A Historical Passage

4 As Long as People Are People:Voluntarism, Government, and Politics

5 Dams, Jeeps, and People-Centred Development: The South Asian Experience

6 Conclusion:Towards the Double Movement

Notes

Index

Foreword

by Richard Harmston,

Executive Director, SAP Canada

South Asia Partnership (SAP) is an alliance of six voluntary development organizations in Canada and South Asia that have been working together since 1981 to support sustainable human development in South Asia. The six independent national organizations—SAP Canada, SAP Bangladesh, SAP India, SAP Nepal, SAP Pakistan, and SAP Sri Lanka—constitute SAP International, governed by an international board and coordinated through a Secretariat in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

With a shared goal of working towards the elimination of poverty, powerlessness, and injustice in South Asia and globally, the SAP network believes in the potential of people’s organizations to bring about lasting change. SAP is dedicated to strengthening the capacities, voices, and collective action of community organizations nationally, throughout the South Asia region, and internationally.

SAP organizations in Asia provide a range of capacity-building services to over one thousand NGOs and community-based organizations in South Asia. Training, networking, community development, communications, and advocacy programs contribute to building strong, self-determined communities that can address local problems, manage development activities, and contribute to public policies on matters affecting people’s lives. In addition to their national programs, SAP organizations also work on a regional basis through SAP International, bringing community activists and decision-makers together on regional and global issues.

In Canada, SAP Canada acts as a forum and information centre for a membership of twenty-two NGOs and a broad constituency of diverse organizations interested in human development and justice, specifically in South Asia. SAP Canada members and networks provide support to SAP programs in Asia, participate in learning and solidarity activities with South Asian organizations, and collaborate to increase public engagement and government support for development in South Asia.

Each year, SAP Canada holds a major forum in Canada on an evolving issue related to development work in South Asia. The 1997 forum, Strengthening Civil Society: Progressive Strategy or Smokescreen? grew out of an increasing use of the terminology of civil society by SAP and others, and exposure to the brewing debate on civil society as a development strategy.

Why was the term being used? What were donor expectations? Was it distracting from poverty reduction activity? Was it reflecting an abrogation of government responsibilities or an emphasis on the market? Did it offer a more empowering context for development effort? Did it imply new approaches or was it old wine in a new bottle?

The forum aimed to generate analysis, country-specific information, donor perspectives, dialogue, reflection, and strategies. Participants explored theoretical concepts of civil society, civil society environments and relations in Canada and South Asia, and civil society as a development strategy; they participated in case studies on strengthening civil society; and they considered the nature of partnerships for civil society.

The forum was organized by SAP in partnership with the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC—Oxford, U.K.) and the North-South Institute, Ottawa. It was held in three locations across Canada: the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, the University of Calgary (with the Division of International Development), and the Coady International Institute in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Participants in these three events included thirty-eight resource people from Canada and ten from South Asia, including Neera Chandhoke, professor of political science, University of Delhi, and author of State and Civil Society:Explorations in Political Theory. The forum received its main funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), with additional support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, the North-South Institute, and the Canadian Centre for Foreign Policy Development.

The information, materials, resources, proceedings, and, in general, the interest generated from the forums led to the writing of this book, which was made possible by a grant from the Trillium Foundation.

Acknowledgements

With the passing of the Cold War civil society has been much-discussed, preoccupying those who—not subscribing to any fuzzyminded End of History thinking—would ask what next? How to navigate the changing terrain on which government, the market, and voluntary organizations occupy shifting positions? How are those involved in age-old struggles for social justice and equality to make sense of the sudden reappearance of a notion that had long languished in the mists of political theory, only to emerge as a fashionable topic echoing around conference halls from Vancouver to Karachi?

This book had its origins in one such meeting, a 1997 conference organized by the South Asia Partnership. Linda Moffat of SAP-Canada asked me to write a short book that would elaborate on some of the themes that emerged at that forum. She was the moving force behind this book, patiently encouraging me to keep stabbing away at a task that one of her colleagues described as like trying to pin multi-coloured jelly to a wall. I am indebted to Linda for her cheerful support when I was trying to make sense of it all. Thanks also to Faris Ahmed, Jonathan Barker, Paul Eprile, David Peerla, Mohammad Qadeer, Ian Smillie, Gauri Sreenivasan, Aparna Sundar, Brian Tomlinson, and Alison Van Rooy for useful comment, criticisms, and additions to my bulging civil society files. Jackie Davies brought her sharp, critical thinker’s eye to a second draft. And as usual that intrepid editor Robert Clarke made sense of it all, bringing whatever consistency and clarity the jelly’s present form takes.

J.S.

Kingston, Ontario

1

Introduction: Unpacking the

Conceptual Ragbag

Those who tout it as the silver bullet both to open repressive societies and to guarantee or deepen democratic liberties and curb state power move with feline grace between using civil society as a descriptive term and as a prescriptive one.

David Rieff, The Nation, 1999

Each year since 1990 the United Nations Development Programme has issued a tidy, accessible, large-format book packed with statistics and current analysis. Added up, the details are meant to provide the latest sum total of human economic and social progress. The Human Development Report might feature a quote from Gandhi: The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed. Or it might show, in a revealing graph, that although South Asian women made progress in school enrolment between 1970 and 1992, in Bangladesh the average wage of women is still barely 40 per cent of the amount paid to men. This is a world in which more than a billion people cannot meet their basic needs, while (according to one writer) other consumers—including me and most likely you and the societies in which we live—are consuming in ways that cannot long be sustained environmentally or socially and that are quite often inimical to our own well-being.¹

Each year too, as Canada once again comes out on top of the UN’s human development index—a measure that seeks to capture as many aspects of human development as possible in one simple composite index and to produce a ranking of human development achievements²—the response has been predictable. Like a hometown fan at a hockey game, the prime minister renews a ritual chant. We’re Number One! The press corps duly records the details of our position of pride.

In a country like Nepal, the reaction may be more muted. Canada is a rich country, Nepal poor. On the UN list Nepal is nestled alongside Yemen and Madagascar, at number 152.

Which does not mean that there are not lots of rich people in the Himalayan kingdom and that poverty is not a problem in Toronto or Tuktoyaktuk. What it does mean is that poverty is a Great Divide, a continuing challenge to a world that spends more on playing golf than on social programs for children, a world in which Europe and the United States spend more on pet food than on the additional funds needed to provide basic health and nutrition throughout the South. The Canadian prime minister, a keen golfer, did not address the 1998 Human Development Report’s finding that Canada had slipped to tenth place in that year’s new human poverty index, which measured illiteracy, poverty, social exclusion, and unemployment.

That massive poverty exists in a world of unprecedented wealth is no longer a matter of great debate, if it ever was. During the second half of the twentieth century, with the old colonial systems collapsed or overturned, study after study documented the dismal realities and grim prospects for development of what would become known as the majority world. Theorist after theorist presented neat, and sometimes not so neat, solutions for tackling the Great Divide and solving the problems of underdevelopment. There would be stages of growth, takeoff points, partners in development. In Canada and elsewhere, as governments sent only an irregular dribble of funds and resources in the direction of foreign aid, other institutional forces, large and small, outside government but often connected with it, had to attempt to fill the breach—a case, as we will see, of civil society to the rescue, or at least to the attempted rescue.

As a result the past three to four decades, in both the rich and poor worlds, have seen an explosion in the growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), so much so that the phenomenon has been called an associational revolution. The business of development—the development enterprise, as I call it—became the preoccupation of a host of these NGOs, and international development became a growth industry. Over two hundred Canadian development NGOs have sprung up along the way. Similarly, in recent years across the South thousands of citizens’ groups have emerged, aimed at everything from digging wells to promoting human rights. The World Bank reckons that a 1993 estimate of $5.7 billion in aid going to NGOs undervalued the total by as much as $3 billion.³ One widely cited estimate claims that there are now some 35,000 NGOs in the South, with 12,000 irrigation co-operatives in South Asia alone. This figure would seem to be low, judging by a statement made by a participant at a 1997 NGO meeting in Nepal who said that Nepal alone had as many as 22,000 NGOs.⁴

In Canada the list of NGOs ranges from large, prominent organizations such as Oxfam to smaller, lesser-knowns such as Horizons of Friendship, based in Cobourg, Ontario. Most if not all of these NGOs receive support from the state, which has, through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), provided funds to a greater or lesser degree to back their work. They are also by definition working outside of the state, perhaps parallel to it, sometimes in opposition to it. Internationally minded NGOs from Oxfam to Amnesty International are only a small part of Canada’s non-governmental sector, which includes everything from wilderness preservers to the gun lobby, from anti-poverty groups to service clubs.

All of these NGOs, in Canada and abroad, are part of this thing called civil society, which, just like this thing called love, can mean many different things to many different people and can operate on highly variable levels of passion and compassion. As a term and concept, civil society has been around for centuries, but it has been revitalized, almost reborn, in recent years. Long familiar to political theorists and academics in sundry subspecialties, the notion of civil society has recently seeped into mainstream political vocabulary. Perhaps it is an idea whose time has come. A search of a leading university’s computerized catalogue under subject brings up sixty-five entries for civil society. Only two predate 1990. There is now such a thing as a civil society manager—or at least Harvard University has a program to certify people looking to engage in such a role (whatever it is). From the left, gadfly author Jeremy Rifkin holds up a similar term—the third sector—as a solution to the vexing problems raised in his 1995 book The End of Work. From the right, The Economist celebrates civil society in the form of NGOs as a fresh alternative to inefficient government structures in the South. These days, it seems, much is expected of civil society in our efforts to deal with poverty and social exclusion, to promote democracy and human rights.

In essence civil society involves the activity of citizens in free association who lack the authority of the state, although the groupings or organizations may have gained access to state resources (and thereby bargained away some of their autonomy). Such activities are motivated by objectives other than profit-making, although citizens may undertake income-generating activity as a means of furthering their objectives.

Still, many non-specialists may respond to the term’s use by thinking that it must surely have something to do with polite behaviour, with a society in which people trust each other and co-operate in the little transactions of everyday life. Of course, the behaviour we expect